Can baseball stadium design throw the game in favor of the home team? Most players and experts think so. Here's how architects and teams conspire to engineer home-field advantage.

In game two of the World Series, Ian Kinsler of the Texas Rangers, hit a long fly ball off the Giants' Matt Cain. The ball hit the very top of the outfield wall at San Francisco's AT&T Park and instead of bouncing over, for a homer, it landed in the glove of Giants outfielder Andres Torres, who held Kinsler to a double. Texas failed to score that inning, and the Giants beat the Rangers for the ninth straight time in the park by the bay. If the same ball had been hit in the Rangers Park in Arlington, Texas, it would have been a home run, and that crucial game might have played out differently.

Welcome to the eclectic world of modern stadium design. While every football field in the NFL is 100 yards long, and every NBA basket is exactly 10 feet, every baseball stadium has different outfield dimensions and unique wall configurations, and these differences can make a huge difference in how the game is played.

Rangers Park in Arlington Texas, where the third, fourth, and possibly fifth games of the World Series will be played, starting today, is one of the best hitter's parks baseball, with teams scoring 9.1 percent more runs than average, sixth highest in the major leagues. That's in stark contrast to AT&T Park, for example, with its exceptionally deep 420-foot right field power alley and very generous foul territory, is a pitcher's paradise, allowing 5.8 percent fewer runs than an average ballpark, which ranks 22nd among 30 Major League stadiums.

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Until a generation ago, most teams made do with the park they had, either playing in a quirky, venerable stadium like Wrigley Field or Fenway Park, or perhaps building a generic cookie-cutter stadium like Three Rivers in Pittsburgh or Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. But both of the stadiums that will host this year's World Series are part of a recent building boom which saw no fewer than 22 new stadiums built since 1990.

Building a brand new park from scratch gives a team a unique opportunity—to design a home that not only provides state-of-the-art amenities, but also gives your team a home field advantage both and in the long-term (like creating an environment in which a team's best players can shine.) and in the short-term (like playing the bounces off an idiosyncratic outfield wall).

"How do you build a team that's right for your ballpark or vice versa? It's a contentious question," says baseball analyst Neil deMause, author of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money into Private Profit. "It takes three, four, five years to build a stadium, so most of your roster is going to turn over," deMause says, "It's hard to build a stadium around a particular player."

David M. Schwarz was the architect for the Rangers Park which was built in 1994, in the first wave of new retro-style stadiums, along with Baltimore's Camden Yards. Schwarz explains that the team's baseball people were intimately involved in the decision-making, from evaluating the entries in the initial competition to the final design phase when the park's details were being finalized.

"We had long conversations about whether to build a pitcher's park or a hitter's park," Schwarz says. "We decided that we didn't know future well enough, so we tried to build a neutral park."

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Toward that end, Schwarz oriented the park so that a prevailing south wind blows toward home plate and keep balls in the park. "Had we oriented it the other way, it would have been an extreme hitter's park."

"We did a lot of things to screen the wind," Schwarz says. For example, the playing field is sunk 22 feet below the level of the surrounding street. The large roofed home run porch in right field, which pays a nod to Tiger Stadium, blocks the breeze, as does a large office building located in center field. On a smaller level, signs and scoreboards were positioned to minimize the impact of the blustery South Texas weather. Schwarz's firm did extensive wind tunnel testing to determine how each tweak would affect the wind on the playing field. (One rejected configuration resulted in a surprising—and potentially disastrous—whirlwind effect much like that of San Francisco's old Candlestick Park.)

Actual game play reveals that Schwarz's screening devices may have done their job a little too well, skewing the advantage to the hitters. "It's harder than you might think to predict how a park is going to play," deMause says. The architect notes that the park tends to play differently from day to day depending on the weather. "A lot of it depends on the wind conditions when the game is played," he says.

The park's other design highlight is an asymmetrical outfield that makes for interesting baseball, and perhaps a small, but significant home field advantage. "We wanted a complex field of play," says Schwarz. "The outfield wall is a series of line segments, not like the continuous arc you'd find in a park of the 1960s or 1970s."

In right center field, for example, the bullpen incorporates a small but important cranny, where the ball will tend to carom at an acute angle either toward right field or back towards center. Rangers outfielders, like All-Star Josh Hamilton, have learned to anticipate the carom while still keeping their eye on the ball. Visitors, like the Giants, who haven't played in Texas since 2001, often have trouble with this judgment call.

"You'll see a ball hit deep to the outfield, and the visiting team has to guess which side of that wall it's going to hit," says Schwarz. "They often guess wrong."

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